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Venezuelan crisis has finally started to have a non-negligible presence in my newsfeed and social media is talking about it too. Have things gotten notably more unstable and bad this past week or is it just that we're exceeding a threshold of humanitarian concern where desperation takes in and starts riots?
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Aug 14, 2016 16:45
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I saw this today, and I initially laughed a little because it reminds me of the Anti-Imperialism thread that got go home ball'd here earlier. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-18/maduro-s-biggest-event-plays-to-handfuls-of-anti-imperialists
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Sep 19, 2016 01:36
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If we ever get up to a million, I would want one just deriving from the historical significance.
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Nov 3, 2017 04:43
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It's really loving weird how caps lock broken can't just assume it is okay to criticize Maduro, a garbage human being, for doing a completely awful thing, in a way which is continued proof of being a hideous and illegitimate ruler. That's never going to be the angle represented. The comport of pseudo-socialist figures, even the most horrid of them, is completely invisible to him until the nanosecond his brain threads it to a criticism of a Great Western Enemy in an almost comical form of pathological whataboutism. To complete the picture, he's about the fastest posting finger in all the west when it comes to any opportunity he doth have to protest his being saddled with the label of whataboutism-er.
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Sep 20, 2018 11:00
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Lightningproof posted:I don't know poo poo about gently caress but surely no one ITT is suggesting US President Donald J. Trump is going to make things better, are they? At best, you could say that Maduro has hosed over the Venezuelan people and infrastructure with such breathtaking greed and idiocy that US involvement could scarcely find ways to make things worse at this point. And given how well US involvement would turn out, that's quite a furious indictment of the gross horror that Maduro is. Venezuela is thoroughly hosed in a way which leaves nations in a pit for decades. "set back economy" hardly covers it.
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Jan 24, 2019 13:36
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RottenK posted:Hussein was way worse than Maduro. Remember how well liberating Iraq went for the people there, and also the entire region? Hussein was way more effective a cruel authoritarian leader than Maduro, and there was plenty of functionality in Iraq to plummet down from, relative to today's Venezuela under Maduro. Though, to be fair, American unilateral interventionism in Latin America is a great candidate for when you're finding creative new ways to make the Venezuelan situation worse.
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Jan 24, 2019 15:06
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caps lock broken: of course maduro's election is real, fair, and genuine caps lock broken: let us compare it, for instance, to an equivalently democratic institution, ... china: say china caps lock broken: china! caps lock broken: am i nailing this china: surely
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Jan 25, 2019 00:11
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Wait, that's a dead letter law since the 70's. You just ... cited your own argument out of existence?
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Jan 25, 2019 02:15
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axelord posted:Then my apologies let me make my opinion clear on the poll and polling in this situation in general. Why does this have to be polling "to show support for the US intervening" - ? Why can this not be about whether or not there is a substantial opposition to Maduro's rule somewhat observable among the Venezuelan people?
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Jan 27, 2019 08:27
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This is a really fun The United States thread, where the suffering and testimony of Venezuelans and the ample evidence of the horrors and illegitimacy of the current Venezuelan government are cast aside by extremely online people in secure and affluent nations, to continue the glorious fight against any imperialism The United States might be doing at any given time, so that countries like China and Russia can expand their power base through political manipulation and economic and military intervention and consolidation of other countries as assets. Take that, imperialism!
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Jan 27, 2019 19:01
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uninterrupted posted:Hm yes those videos of wealthy pasty white venezuelans telling the military to mutiny will surely turn us around on Guaido's policy platform of less public housing, less feeding the hungry, and basically doing whatever the US says. Ah! As the US says! See, this is what I'm talking about. Not even Venezuela can be about Venezuela. It's all about the US, must always continually be kept centrally about the US, where in this thread we can watch people defending Venezuela's right to let Venezuelans die under a brutal, incompetent, authoritarian militant dictator, to protect them from the US. Any further destabilization of Maduro's rule is going to be fundamentally read as the pernicious American influence succeeding in some way which is ultimately bad for them? This is extremely painful to put up with, even absent the delusion that Maduro has benefitted the common welfare of the Venezuelans, as opposed to having absolutely destroyed it through some combination of greed and incompetence that resulted in naked power grabs as the fundament of his continued tenure as leader.
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Jan 27, 2019 19:28
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On top of that, in at least some of the people here, Maduro is being defended because he will bring greater opportunity to imperialism with Chinese or Russian characteristics. The welfare of the actual Venezuelans is irrelevant outside of contrived fictions of greater Extremely Online anti-imperialist aims.
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Jan 27, 2019 19:41
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uninterrupted posted:I love how the right wing coup supporters in this thread use "um, stop talking about the US (which is publicly orchestrating the coup and therefore completely legitimate to metion)" to deflect from their lovely politics. Why do you support Guaido's plan to cut food programs for the poor and public housing? Is starving people only bad when it happens under Maduro? And when exactly was the last time you beat your wife?
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Jan 27, 2019 19:55
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Darth Walrus posted:I think the open question here is how much (and how) the present alternative will help with the whole 'not starving to death' thing. I do not think that there is any present alternatives that are going to be able to reverse the vast majority of damage done to Venezuela by the PSUV, Guaido included. Maduro has managed to create severe social and institutional damage that will live on long beyond him and leave Venezuela in a severely collapsed state. The only solutions for Venezuela existed years before the current situation. You just want a minimally traumatic future series of events that winds down the power of the PSUV to actively loot the country, and hopefully have nothing coming around to severely amplify the country's problems, like the current US president thinking a war to 'liberate' Venezuela would be an excellent distraction from his own domestic crisis. Most Venezuelans just want something to happen to stop the country from being actively bled dry by mismanagement and corruption, but if history is any indication, the country's not likely to get one of those "least bad" options. Probably just more conflict and collapse, maybe a full-blown starvation crisis. Whole portions of the country will end up leased out World Bank style to opportunistic foreign capital. The country itself has already had substantial cultural and brain drain from millions of people fleeing the violence, if they had any means to do so. It's not going to be a great next couple of decades.
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Jan 27, 2019 20:08
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:It's outrageous now that any poster would come in here and try to argue that the shock doctrine policies of the United States which will be pushed through by whatever administration succeeds Maduro, are actually good, because Venezuela needs a return to profitability for foreign creditors at the expense of its people. It would be outrageous, if that were what people were actually saying. It is possible to have public housing and food programs that actively make a country's situation worse, especially if they are blatantly unsustainable schemes entrenched in a corrupt militant dictatorship's attempts to keep a localized power base. Venezuela appears to have such a situation directly set up for a Chavista loyalist pipeline. You can want to replace that system in a way which shouldn't reflexively cause people to go "ah, so you WANT the Venezuelans to starve? SHOCK DOCTRINE??"
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Jan 27, 2019 20:13
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uninterrupted posted:You can. I mean, Guaido doesn’t, but it’s possible in an abstract sense we haven’t seen from the opposition. You've already undercut your analysis of Maduro's opposition, though. I don't think there's much point in going over defense of a current system which is actively causing a complete socioeconomic collapse for the limited, short-sighted benefit of a brutal authoritarian, especially not because it's a sinister neoliberal plot to take (nonexistent) food from the mouths of babes while not actively wondering why almost everyone in the country is impoverished and suffering from significant food availability insecurity unless they're connected very close to PSUV apparatchiks or willing to carry for loyalist enclaves.
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Jan 27, 2019 20:21
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Truga posted:Wouldn't the correct way to fix CLAP then be to buy food on the cheap from real companies instead of just shutting it down though? The most likely outcome with CLAP would be that the entire current corruption scheme is shut down completely, because it is fundamentally down to its beaurocratic core a system that is used as an enrichment scheme for an authoritarian strongman (and a way to consolidate power among a loyalist base). Ideally you would want to replace it with a new system intended to do what you are describing, but this time as an actual social welfare system rather than a funnel scheme. Venezuela will probably have little in the way of ability to maintain much social distribution projects, though. It would have to start with international food aid.
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Jan 27, 2019 20:32
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fnox posted:Can't you imagine that it is profitable to pretend to be socialist? Regarding that particular part with CLAP: it's hardly a new revelation that the entire program is a corruption scheme. There was even decent international reporting on it as early as 2016. The "shock doctrine" line today, in 2019, for criticism of CLAP's current incarnation, has comical appearances of revisionism. Pener Kropoopkin posted:Surely these systems could be reformed through some kind of anti-corruption campaign, but I think some posters (not implying you are) are already rationalizing in their minds why it's good that the social welfare system will be completely dismantled and replaced with nothing. What is actually happening is that people are assuming Venezuela is already so close to complete collapse that an actual social welfare system (as opposed to something that is just being conveniently rationalized AS a social welfare system to reflexively defend Maduro) will be hard to legitimately establish, and that it will be good to have a social welfare system that doesn't tremendously harm Venezuela's productivity in order to funnel power and money to a dominant political group.
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Jan 27, 2019 20:59
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I'd rather care less about the profit-incentivized reasons why companies concern themselves with Venezuelan stability, and more about humanitarian concern for Venezuelan people. I mean, I know that there were asymmetrical reasons why international business interests got increasingly fraught about Maduro, but this is just because he couldn't be a competent dictator if he was going to be a dictator. "Stability" works out the same for them in a liberal democracy or in a brutal dictatorship. Saudi Arabia has managed to be appealingly "stable" to them for many quarters.
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Jan 27, 2019 21:06
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These supposed "Venezuelans" have been undone by their poor command of wild regional ornithology. psyop confirmed!
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Jan 27, 2019 23:27
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Would like to cosign for Chuck Boone. The current status of this thread is only slightly embarrassing, and that would help significantly.
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Jan 28, 2019 02:02
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AFancyQuestionMark posted:Imagine if these sorts of posts were about anti-government protests in the US. Hell, someone told me in one of these threads that "its remarkable that the death counts are so low, when the protesters are this violent. The government is treating them with kids gloves." Which is quite a take to read from alleged leftists. Yikes.
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Jan 28, 2019 19:00
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We will be greeted as liberators and home by Christmas *2027
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Jan 29, 2019 23:39
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meet the new neoliberalism, same as the old neoliberalism!
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Jan 29, 2019 23:50
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Berke Negri posted:probably not But the question is genuinely a lot more if the people in charge think it is, and that they'll definitely get it right in latin america this time. qkkl posted:Would you support intervention if the US supplied boatloads of free food to Venezuela, and Maduro then filmed himself pissing on all of it and dumping it into the ocean? I would actually take that to be further proof that US intervention of any sort doesn't appear to be productive or beneficial, and assume it would mean we should stop shipping food to Venezuela. But he wouldn't do that. He'd forward it to loyalist enclaves in a continuation of his food weaponization that's been documented for at least four years.
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Feb 1, 2019 01:46
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I guess that's an added level of on type visual surrealism to the whole waning-years-of-a-dictator imagery of Maduro. An authoritarian starts to look like he's gorged himself and/or stress eaten his way to hypertension, while he presides over a country he's inflicted crisis food insecurity and growing malnutrition on. For bonus points, have it conclude with that he keeps getting larger for a few years and then keels over with a LAD widowmaker, which will obviously, of course, have been a targeted CIA killing.
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Feb 1, 2019 03:18
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uninterrupted posted:That's why the vast majority of Venezuelans don't support Guaido and the West is forcing him on the country by stealing their foreign assets. Who keeps telling these people this?
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Feb 6, 2019 03:24
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:Do you plan to acknowledge the fact that you are supporting a dictator starving his people He does not, but i'm still interested in the division of respectability and where they cycle the disinformation among themselves. Does Venezuela state media suffice?
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Feb 6, 2019 03:57
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uninterrupted posted:No, you see they’ve already gotten rich off black market food hoarding and reselling and left Venezuela, now it’s time to blame the crisis on completely unfounded claims that Maduro is stealing everything for himself. This is bad, even for the Venezuela thread. It's along the lines of blaming jangmadang moms for causing north korea's mass famine. Your entire line of reasoning terminates at that you plainly don't understand what caused the bachaqueros to come about during Venezuela's severe products shortages / hyperinflation crises, and are so desperate to write off the lived experiences of Venezuelans, that you portray the entire phenomenon as some sort of mass grift and come up with the posting equivalent of the fox news "and look at these supposedly "poor" venezuelans, 96% have ..." Mr Luxury Yacht posted:Didn't at least one of the goons being accused of being a "wealthy Venezuelan expat" only manage get out of Venezuela because of other goons helping pay for him to get out? I recall a pass the hat moment a couple years ago. I believe I watched part of that take place, and I hope whoever it is still posts, but I don't remember the name.
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Feb 6, 2019 17:55
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I mean really all this polemic on the Venezuelans is missing right now is for someone to draft up a huge-nose picture of the wealth hoarding Venezuelan expats carrying giant bags labeled 'hoarded bachaquero money' across the Venezuela border and snickering "heh heh, I can't wait to support a neoliberal coup against my own people so that Maduro can stop making their lives so great"
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Feb 6, 2019 18:26
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The tank-ish anti-imperialist take on Venezuelan lived experience has now a. furiously defended the food distribution programs that Maduro has been using for years as a blatantly corrupt enrichment scheme, asserting that challenges to it are proof of the true aims of a privatization interest coup and now also b. described the bachaqueros reselling toilet paper during a time of hyperinflation and critical food and supply shortages as "getting rich off black market food hoarding and reselling" basically, their ideological corner on the venezuela political takes map can be labeled "everything is a massively corrupt enrichment scheme, except for actual massively corrupt enrichment schemes, which are fine" and now, almost symbolically, the venezuelan food aid program's freight boxes are used to physically bar food aid. Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:why can't these dickless lefties see the potential upsides of sledgehammering racially impure children to death, extremely good question. Challenging people's actual arguments must lie somewhere between terrifying you and being extremely inconvenient to your foreign savior gatekeeping. I guess that will never change, but can we quit with this repetition of theme with dicks, just at minimum? uninterrupted posted:“Yeah but this time is different! And I haven’t put my dick in anything for a while, this might end up better!” gently caress's sake, you too, extremely different person.
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Feb 6, 2019 23:20
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Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:
Like I said, confronting people's actual positions must be entirely too much of a matter of discomfort for you.
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Feb 7, 2019 09:23
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This thing with the small arms found on a plane is another example of Maduro imitating the things that Chavez did, of the sort that worked out generally well for Chavez, but get weirder and more desperate as his successor wears them out. Chavez was pretty good at weaponizing the fierce antagonism of the US back against the US government and becoming a more popular ruler domestically as a result. Maduro's dividends aren't as great, but as you can see in this thread, you don't have to be particularly clever to sell a story to the people that it was bound to work on regardless. Maduro doesn't have to really care whether or not there's any evidence the small arms came from the CIA at all, or even the most likely reason at all for those guns being on a plane. Just claim it as a massive American plot against Venezuelans. Regime supporters will buy in immediately. They certainly did here. Venezuelan officials most likely chanced across these weapons either being smuggled in or part of other general trafficking, and they immediately and breathlessly slapped it up in state media as conclusive evidence of perfidious plots against the good peoples of Venezuela and their legitimate and benevolent ruler -- me, Maduro! Moreover, this has to have been a top-down plot by the CIA. The fun part about this is that it's been the MO of rightist Israeli media since forever. When the Mavi Marmara was forcefully boarded by Israeli shock troops as part of the Gaza flotilla raid, they stacked up literally anything on the ship that could be construed as a weapon, and Israeli media endlessly reported the resulting assembly of standard tools and some kives as evidence of wide ranging plots to arm anti-Israeli forces with weapons and destabilize the area. I had to watch people using the "Mavi Marmara weapons smugglers" being a constant refrain by zionist opposition for literally years after that fact, so it's a bit cool to watch people geared up to get effortlessly played by essentially the same playbook.
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Feb 8, 2019 20:44
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RussianRoulette posted:Pardon the naive question, but I'm wondering why the current hyperinflation in Venezuela can't be combatted by encouraging the regime to switch to a more stable foreign currency, as per https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevehanke/2019/01/01/venezuelas-hyperinflation-hits-80000-per-year-in-2018/? Hyperinflation is fundamentally tied to things like that Maduro/the PSUV didn't respond to the unsustainability of some of their programs by changing them to make them sustainable, mostly because Maduro is a corrupt, inept authoritarian strongman first and a socialist last and only when he is incidentally able to appropriate the label for himself at no risk to his ruling junta and personal pocketbook. Instead, he continually defaulted to just printing more money. Things like Venezuela's price fixing programs put impossible matches between "the absolute minimum cost you can make thing" and "the absolute maximum you are allowed to sell thing for" and were too corrupt and ineptly run otherwise to even allow the country to sustainably benefit and distribute the wealth of its own natural resources. Maduro still needed to keep production paid out and running (and pay workers, and keep the lights on in buildings making things and all of that) without admitting the whole thing was a crisis level failure, because this comes at too much risk to Maduro and his control of vast sums of Venezuelan wealth. His chosen option was to just keep printing money and assuring people that the system works and the centralized, socialized systems shall continue as usual. then when the value of that money went down, print more money with more zeroes, and piledrive your country into the loving ground. This is a process that can go on about for as long as you can still actually even afford to run printers, as we saw in other places like Zimbabwe. It's also what Maduro has chosen to do, because he's a corrupt rear end in a top hat who, if all else fails, showed his primary interest was in fleecing the country hard enough to pipeline enough wealth and resources to factions that allow him to hold power at any cost. He has continued to do so even if it has brought the entire country to (and then beyond) a point of failure and left the vast majority of the country in poverty and food insecurity, with insanely growing violence, breakdown of even the most basic civic functions of governance or medicine and created a growingly monumental potential for civil war and/or complete famine -- when pipelines for food totally shut down, rather than just mostly shut down. Venezuela did dick around with the idea of cryptocurrency but I have heard very little about it and I would not be surprised to find out that it was the PSUV spitballing, attempting it with major deficiencies in funding and expertise, and the whole thing turning out to be a waste of time / embarrassment / scam as a result. Another couple of aspects of what Venezuela has already passed the point of no return on and which will leave the country hosed up for decades after this no matter what are that: 1. the emigration crisis also represents severe brain drain, because way way too many of the Venezuelans who had the technical or aptitudinal means to get the gently caress out of Venezuela for virtue of the fact that they know how to do things like run dams or build very tall buildings or code or manage oil refineries (kind of important there) got the gently caress out of venezuela to go earn a living somewhere where they aren't paid in bricks of useless money and they don't have to stand in. Some leftists look at that and exclaim in a celebratory fashion that it's just a bunch of bougie price fixers fleeing a richly deserved fate and proving that they weren't true to the spirit of glorious Socialism with Maduro Characteristics or whatever, but that still just leaves you with a country that can't build poo poo and can't even extract its own reserves. 2. Maduro's tenure has, as alluded to before, left Venezuela mostly or fully unable to manage its own natural resources. Maduro was already sort of busy with a fire sale of Venezuela's public resources anyway, so it's not really something that was too terribly fixable even a year before now. It's also left Venezuela open to extreme foreign influence, including getting sold out to the Russians or Chinese under the Venezuelan people's noses, or for literally John Bolton to be able to get right back to loving over latin america because the country's a hot mess and, in his eyes, ripe for Liberation. The actual Venezuelans here who have actual understanding of the situation on the ground can correct me on these points, but I hope I have a generally correct understanding. IMO Moldova probably had it better, but that's going to be a weird judgement call. It all comes down to the robustness of the democratic process, and seeing if there's ultimately a way out for Venezuelans through organized process. Also, to your last question, I really don't think so. I don't give the US any faith or credit in regards to latin american intervention.
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Feb 14, 2019 11:47
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Acebuckeye13 posted:But that's the core problem, the PSUV elite have become so insulated from both political and economic consequences of their actions that the Venezuelan opposition can't manage it themselves. Not to say that these particular sanctions are justified, and I can understand why you and others would desire that the US and other countries remain entirely neutral. But with that in mind, you really have to think about what the opposition, or any opposition, could do given the measures the PSUV has undertaken to ensure de facto one party rule. It's an accelerated version of election fixing in individual US states, given whole years of absolute success to the extent that nothing is required but the barest pretenses of democratic legitimacy. You just say you hold elections and everything's perfectly legitimate and you're all just being sore losers.
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Feb 18, 2019 01:07
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I see we are happily stumbling into one inevitable portion of ghoulish takes by the anti-imperialists: "the killed protesters were asking for it, they are a fundamentally violent movement"
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Feb 22, 2019 18:18
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M. Discordia posted:I really want to hear from the people who think "Venezuelan sovereignty" even at the cost of the end of democracy and mass starvation is the key issue, when Venezuela sold its government to Cuba and its industry to China years ago. I guess "sovereignty" is only good when it works against the expansion of liberal democracy or serves anti-U.S. interests? Well, honestly, while the PSUV has been essentially pawning off Venezuelan public systems to foreign governments like crazy, it's the result of crisis incompetence. There's a way to make it worse, if explicitly non-venezuelan interests become the primary instigator of privatization rather than Maduro burning the country's sovereign assets away to keep afloat.
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Mar 3, 2019 22:49
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Chuck Boone posted:The blackout is still affecting most of the country. This is unprecedented. I do not imagine that the electrical infrastructure is in very manageable shape, even compared to a baseline standard of a few years ago where electrical engineers were submitting statements of protest over the gross negligence and mismanagement of vital city systems. I also imagine that, compared to those years, a substantial portion of those engineers are not present at their posts anymore. I forget where I heard it, but apparently they tend to be one of the more reliable parts of brain drain when a system is drowning in corruption, blatantly unsustainable operational cuts, or other mismanagement. If you've worked with transformers and heavy duty fuses enough to know you don't want to be the one working on them as a system teeters to collapse and said transformers and fuses have become overloaded and neglected, you leave rather than become whichever poor fucker gets flash-cooked on a rush job of catastrophically overdue maintenance.
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Mar 8, 2019 18:14
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Condiv posted:I’m not sure what to believe wrt the food crises. Whether I believe your side of the events or not isn’t really germane to what I said though. I think there's a fair bit of evidence that there's a food crisis, but I guess the most important question is if I can find a source that would be credible enough for you. All I can contribute is personally knowing two venezuelans who used to work in .. I think it was combine harvesting? If not a combine, some kind of thing where you drive farm trucks and harvesting equipment on large fields. They really started to notice problems as annual harvests kept getting delayed and field maintenance stopped being done because the agriculture fund was effectively quasi-legally being bled into the pockets of party officials, and then later when they realized that loyalist groups (chavistas?) were getting most of the social food distribution program redirected to them and it was getting harder to find basic, staple foods or cooking oil, even at secondhand black market resellers they called bachaqueros. This was bad news for them because they hadn't ever had much of a salary, and hyperinflation would render their pay irrelevant in increasingly rapid timeframes. Then Carnival rolled around and they remembered how people used to throw eggs, but you really couldn't do that anymore. People were starting to lose weight. You could buy handbags made entirely of artistically folded banknotes in progressively obscene denominations. Stores would be empty or closed. TV would show pictures of creatively stocked stores (example in this thread, if you look back, shelves perspective-filled with just nothing but some kind of sauce and then sold on state media as "look! we're totally stocked! so much food!"). People started losing even more weight. People who had means started saying "I have to find a way to get out of here." People who could buy flights out simply did so. Then, people specifically and intentionally stopped talking about having to get out. Hunger started creating secondhand crisis. The fields went unmaintained and unharvested. Groups of looters would break in and strip anything out of the farm equipment they thought they could resell for money. Waits in food distribution lines got longer and longer. They found a way to leave. They aren't living around here anymore but they try to keep in touch with all the people still in the country, who largely have no means to leave. They are mostly apolitical I think from the tortured exhaustion of having lived under a bit of a kleptocratic mess, but in Maduro they see nothing of Chavez, and they have no illusions that the country will be able to heal while it is still subject to the weight of Maduro's policy of "Maduro doing whatever it takes to keep control of the public resources Maduro can fleece to extend a lease on power" Things are very ... not great there. People are genuinely starving, and the legacy is, in a primary sense, the product of quite observable negligence and criminality by an increasingly dysfunctional and despotic regime.
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Mar 8, 2019 19:28
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I believe, sincerely, that sanctions are a relatively minimal component of the mess in Venezuela at present. I think that even if they were done away with tomorrow, it would make a somewhat negligible impact on the general crisis of the Venezuelan state, because it will ultimately only be utilized to extend the power conservation structures of a kleptocratic, somewhat measurably inept leadership. While I am in favor of removing all sanctions on Venezuela and staying uninvolved, complete reversal of the sanctions would effectively translate to military and loyalist appropriation of the majority of food aid, then resale to the rest of the general populace via bachaquero-style means.Keeshhound posted:As someone who does not have an engineering degree, how does this realistically get fixed? It almost sounds like they might just need to tear everything out and start over. If this gets to true shitshow levels, expect it to have a triad of problems which are severe enough on their own, but combine spectacularly to create extreme human misery. 1. Institutional neglect - parts are old or poorly maintained from built-up years of insufficient institutional means of support and insufficient funding. 2. Mismanagement via corruption - see also what happened to Venezuela's oil industry. Systems that cover up the reality of operational reports are especially dangerous. 3. Looting - when a bit of copper (or anything else that looks remotely pawnable) will go a long way to feeding you or your children in a time of need, it will start being hacked or clipped out of your infrastructure fast. brain drain can likely be rolled up into point no. 2 somewhat, but I do legitimately imagine a lot of qualified technicians and electricians are no longer involved or invested in maintenance compared to as short as a few years ago. I suppose if they had the means they left the country to find work somewhere that might pay them in stable currency and/or not start to electrocute them in substantial numbers, and will be written off as decadent bourgeois neoliberal traitors or something. The rest may have just stopped getting reliable pay and are more busy finding food in other ways.
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Mar 8, 2019 19:44
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